BlackBerry Announces Q20 'Classic' Phone, BES 12

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

BARCELONA—BlackBerry CEO John Chen says he can take the company from a $4.4 billion quarterly loss to breaking even within a year. At Mobile World Congress here, he announced a new phone designed to appeal to BlackBerry's corporate faithful, hinted at more devices, and unveiled the latest version of BlackBerry's server software.

Chen calls the new BlackBerry Q20 the "classic." It'll be a hardware QWERTY device with a trackpad, a touch screen, and the old-school Menu, Back, Send, and End buttons above the screen. It'll run BlackBerry 10 and be available in the second half of this year.

"I've seen a lot of major customers, and virtually everybody that I met loves our keyboards," Chen said. "We gave them a keyboard phone called a Q10, and for some reason they didn't love it as much as I thought they'd love it. They like the belt on top of the keyboard, the little trackpad and the return button and the Send and End and all that. We decided to listen to our customers," he said.

The Q20 won't be the end of BlackBerry's QWERTY line for 2014, either. Chen teased " a few high-end devices that we're working on, but I'm unable to show you." Later in the event, I heard from people in the know that there may be a "30" model in the QWERTY line scheduled for later in the year.

The Q20 follows the Z3 (pictured above), BlackBerry's low-cost, under-$200 5-inch touch-screen phone targeted at Indonesia and southeast Asia. For more, check out our first look at the Z3.

The company also announced BES 12, a new version of BlackBerry's server software, which will support users of old BlackBerrys, newer models, iPhones, Androids, and even connected objects that aren't phones. BlackBerry will aggressively migrate customers over to BES 12 by offering a one-for-one license swap with older versions of BES as far back as BES 5, and with other competing mobile device management systems, as long as subscribers sign up for a support contract.

Spread Too Thin?
In a voluble, chatty, and often funny Q&A with press, Chen explained where he thought BlackBerry went wrong with BlackBerry 10, and how he'll right the ship.

"Our BB10 is a very, very good technology, but it took me a while to get used to it. Once I got used to it, I loved it. Most of the consumers, when you get to our new phone, if it's not intuitively obvious, they get a little shy. We did not do enough in educating the market about how great things are," he said.

The company's new partnership with Foxconn is critical, dramatically speeding up production and reducing costs. Foxconn is taking BlackBerry's inventory exposure and has reduced phone development times from 9-12 months down to three, Chen said.

And no, BlackBerry isn't dead in the U.S. The company's U.S. sales are extremely low right now, but Chen said they'll be focusing on enterprise sales to the 30 percent of companies that don't want people bringing in their own iPhones and Android devices - mostly "regulated industries" like health care, law, government, and Wall Street.

"Today and for the next 18 months, you'll see us very much intent on going back and winning the regulated industries, that 30 percent," he said.

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 9 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, one of the hosts of the daily PCMag Live Web show and speaks frequently in mass media on cell-phone-related issues. His commentary has appeared on ABC, the BBC, the CBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and in newspapers from San Antonio, Texas to Edmonton, Alberta.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer, having contributed...
More »